Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?
The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism

Kia orana, greetings!

What a nice surprise! I actually have no recollection of taking the survey, being in the middle of a major depressive episode at the time ... brought on by 20+ years of butting a fairly thick head against the even thicker brick walls of barely-post-colonial island society, but I’m in my happy place again.

General comment: advent of new media will be most effective, sustainable and successful if we hold our noses and swallow our pride and seek as many partnerships with old media as possible.

Why? Beware the long term consequences of divide and conquer tactics, employed so endearingly by your favourite profit-consumed conglomerates to at first fight, then take over independent old school media - hold your friends close, as they say, and your enemies closer.

Old media workers are just new media workers waiting to be reborn, and we should help them through that process rather than allow an industry to be taken apart bit by bit.

In my opinion, the best thing new media could do would be to agitate for massive reinvestment in old media, particularly among public broadcasters. The last 20 years have seen an evolution of old media to include corporate priorities.

Time, now, for a swing back of the pendulum?

And who better to do it, than us?

Congratulations to the Knight riders for pulling together what looks like a fabulously juicy report!

Ki mua, onwards!

jason

Citizen journalism an innovative and powerful tool to knowledge based society

Information is the basis of knowledge. When any information we know is processed and lodged in our minds became knowledge. We are rapidly proceeding towards knowledge society in information era. To acquire verities of knowledge on different subjects, the future dreamed knowledge society will require multi levels information delivery systems. The Contemporary media and other information channels and sources could not alone meet the demands of information, so knowledge societal ethics ask every citizen to contribute his or her share to make this society reality.

      In contemporary journalism gate keepings are done at every level in name of editorial reviews, and premium membership. But citizen journalism is trying to remove all such gate keepings from journalism because in knowledge society every citizen is a torch carrier of information. In true spirit lesser gate keeping will be the guarantee of high valued citizen journalism .Knowledge society can not will be developed in computers or other electronics gadgets but only and only in human minds, so without equal participations of each and every minds, big or small. We couldn’t dream of our future .The free, fair and fast (3F) 4 all should be the main ethics of citizen journalism.
    To understand the definition and scope of citizen journalism one should go to the roots of traditional journalism. The journalism was developed and lived with human from Stone Age to computer age but its nature and scope were different in every age of human development. In stone age journalism was in form of verbal intrapersonal as requirements of that age were geographical and anatomical .Than came the mechanical/technological age, when wheel started to turned the development of mankind, in this age print and electronic journalism had made its presence because machine produced products made free economics traveling around the world cutting across the geographical barriers. The information era popularly called information revolution, knowledge based society will be its bio product. To meet the future demand of information revolution, journalism has to change its contemporary form to basics, from where it had started participation of all as it were in Stone Age when every human had to act as journalist to make information flow in his or her society. Again in information revolution every citizen has to make his or her informatory contribution. The citizen journalism has emerged as an innovative and powerful tool for common citizens to deliver their shares in shaping knowledge based society in or around them.

Good comments, possibly, if I could make any of them out among thickets of words, sentences ...and that big, big last paragraph.

Your life is short, fellow journizen, learn to communuicate your vision effectively.

Paragraph breaks, for example, are an old and time honoured way of giving your audience mental breathing space to read, to absorb and to think.

The rise of hyperlocal journalism…i don’t know if everything is taken into consideration. Indeed there are great prospects but there are side effects like subjectivity and lack of news.

The link above is inside my organization’s web site.  Click on Newton News to view the first Video On Demand newscast we are experimenting with.

I am frankly astonished that this study completely ignores Public, Educational, and Governmental cable access TV (PEG)

PEG is hyperlocal.  PEG provides wide opportunity for local citizen journalists to foster programming which can eventually reach the web.  PEG access centers teach people how to write, produce, and film hyperlocal events and issues.

Again, I am truly amazed this study entirely overlook the over 2,500 access stations in America, many of which are well-funded for the very purpose of hyperlocal programming, and many of which have been doing this for over 30 years.

Paul D. Berg, Executive Director, NewTV - Newton MA
http://www.newtv.org
Member, Board of Directors
MassAccess, the Massachusetts Chapter of the Alliance for Comunity http://www.massaccess.org/Media

http://ourchannels.org/

The link I referred to is:
http://www.newtv.org/vod.htm

I am Referring this link for democracy in india.

IMHO hyperlocal journalism is better than no journalism at all:)

thanks for the post, yeah i agree with you that the existing system needs overhaul…history may repeats itself if future generation do nothing to prevent it from happening…

i think people are just feeling jaded right now in the midst of political storm..after a while, it will gain back its momentum..

interesting read - I’d absolutely agree that IMHO hyperlocal journalism is better than no journalism at all!

interesting read - hyperlocal journalism is better than nothing at all or is it?

The media creates fear and anger to society, so who knows what damage hyperlocal journalism can do when the media is bad enough as it is already.

Do you have djvu version? I can’t read PDF in linux:(

Well if hyperlocal journalism is all that’s avaialble to you then it’s better to go for it and see how it fits your desires than dismiss it straight off.

Thank you for this article.. I’ll bookmark it so that i can read every chapter. I’m a bit slow learner.

“Do you have djvu version? I can’t read PDF in linux” the same. please post djvu…

Very interesting topic

Great information, thanks. I think the best part was about creating content -  it was a good read.

Would like to have read more about Baristanet’s approach to making money from their small site. The implication is they’re dealing with small advertisers. Learning how to attract small advertisers online and how to wad all those little dollars up into some big ones are lessons every newspaper Web site needs. Anything stand out as unique to luring small advertisers?

Interesting indeed

Great idea and wonderful service! Personally I am so jealous to make such of your web presentation, especially in Indonesian version where at some points have been challenged to reveal the very kernel of responsible journalism!

I think hyperlocal is going to the buzzword for just about everything in the very near future.

I just sent this off to 3 clients that have recently hired my firm to help in similar types of media.  “Hyperlocal Journalism” looks to me like a great start of the next step in the web fight with social marketing and news data.

Nice information and very comprehensive.  I agree with much of the content.  Sensationalized news stories on a local level is quite a scary proposition.

Nice book and very interesting.  I got a lot of new.

That’s a good piece of research. I’ve got the feeling that the development of local journalism and media that we are seeing today is the major trend that will lead to a completely new understanding of media’s influence on the society.

Thank you for this book. Very interesting

It’s great to have such interesting timespending.

Sounds very interesting. I will share it to my friends…

Very informative.  Gives a broad perspective of the modern change in media.

Very interesting book!

Journalism and its interaction with society really interests me..

and I must admit, this was a fantastic read…interesting and very comprehensive(the level of research shows)!

A great resource for anyone deciding to research about hyperlocal journalism…

Learning how to attract small advertisers online and how to wad all those little dollars up into some big ones are lessons every newspaper Web site needs. But what more is needed?

Thanks much for the download.  And best of all, free! :-)

The interaction between “new media” and “old media” is rather difficult issue, as we can see from the “AOL - Time Warner” merger story. It’s up to strong management.

Great piece, thanks for sharing.

This is a great piece.  Thanks for taking the time to put all of this together.

LOL, I think hyperlocal journalism is better than no journalism at all:)

Citizen media is the future!  Bloggers often provide better news reports then large media outlets.  And in my city, Cleveland, Ohio, a large news station has begun allowing comments on posted articles.  Often they include responses to stories on their live TV broadcast.

I believe media is changing and moving away from the large and often biased media outlets.

Always good to shake up the big players even in the media game. Trusted news sources are always going to be needed however.

Thank you for this article.. I’ll bookmark it so that i can read every chapter.

I had such a website idea not too long ago. It’s great to see that the majority, 82% of the sites’ owners, are willing to continue updating them even if the resources run out. This enthusiasm they have is refreshing. A lot of sites today are completely commercial, making them bland and completely void of feelings.
Commerce is good, we need money to survive, and others need the products we sell. But when you love what you are writing about, even on a commercial website, it really shows. And your readers love you for it.

Would like to have read more about Baristanet’s approach to making money from their small site. The implication is they’re dealing with small advertisers. Learning how to attract small advertisers online and how to wad all those little dollars up into some big ones are lessons every newspaper Web site needs. Anything stand out as unique to luring small advertisers?

Thank you for this article. It’s vety useful

@Jason

“The information era popularly called information revolution, knowledge based society will be its bio product.”

This is a very interesting notion. That is to say the ‘information revolution.’ I firmly believe that we are at the very beginning of the information revoltion much like the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.

What will the consequences be of this information revolution? Will knowledge multiply? Sounds almost biblical if you are familiar with the so called ‘end times’ scenarios as described in the bible.

We can’t help but acknowledge that the internet has exponentially increased the amount of knowledge that a person can receive on a daily basis. It’s truly incredible.

Regarding old school media and the information revolution I feel that bloggers, although not entirely respected by the media elite, are a balancing force in ultra modern media. This kind of goes along with your analogy of going back to a time when every voice counted.

More and more people are definitely suspicious of main stream media outlets like cable news and old print media such as the NYTimes. Talk radio, once almost dead has come back to life in a major way as people seek alternatives to the egregiously slanted and biased elite media.

Look at Fox News for example. Although they are the number one rated cable news program they lack credibility among the academia. While on the other hand the NYTimes and MSNBC lack credibility with right wing types.

So the outcome has been that people are turning to talk radio (the conservatives mostly) and blogs for their news.

Interesting comments! Got me thinking.

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Thanks for the article. It contained alot of fine points.

There is little doubt that citizen media is where we are heading.  One just needs to watch CNN for a few hours to see how Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and video conferencing is bringing citizens into the role of reporting the news.

This may actually allow us to get a clearer picture of the world without the media bias and spin.

I don’t think there is anyway to avoid the direction of citizen media with how various internet platforms are being built around this.  One thing to note though is that Citizens just like big media can let their biases into what they are reporting on.  Spin may always be there.

I agree that Citizen media is most likely what we’ll be seeing a lot of in the future. And it’s true that people have a hard time removing their bias from a story. We have to accept that there will always be bias and it’s up to us to form an opinion on the information being reported. Additionally, hyperlocal reporting will absolutely be very popular very soon. It is already exploding in popularity now and it is to a great extent a product of Citizen media.